Gopher Tortoise Still In Danger

[corbett]

Central Florida is one of those areas with high turtle fatalities from urban sprawl and habitat encroachment. Incidental deaths are one thing. Legal slaughter of wild creatures which play a vital role in the ecology of their surroundings is quite another. Even though the gopher tortoise is faced with extinction, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) still honors permits which allow developers to bulldoze gopher tortoise habitat, crushing tortoises to death or burying them alive. An estimated 96,000 gopher tortoises have died in this manner since 1991.

On August 1, 2007, the FWC stopped accepting applications for permits to "pay and bury" gopher tortoises. But at the same time, FWC "grandfathered" kill permits that allow the destruction of thousands more tortoises. It's time to close the book on the killing.

Please complete the following petition to ask the FWC to reclassify this keystone species as threatened and nullify old permits.

Kudos to the Humane Society for making this page available!

https://community.hsus.org/campaign/FL_2007_tortoises3

[RockaFowler]

1. This is going on in Port St Lucie as well

There are tortoises everywhere here. The St Lucie County Commission just passed a law making it unlawful to bury the tortoises any longer. I can't believe that they did it at all.